The other day, I read a blog post—an extremely amusing one, in all fairness—mocking the startup world. I’m sure it has ended up on your Twitter feed; it uses a certain swear word in every line. Yup, this one.

It got me thinking, which can only mean trouble ;). Seriously, it did get me thinking: yes, there are some perks and attitudes in startups that lend themselves to mockery and some personalities who can be easily caricatured. But if I were you I wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, not just yet. Wait until you read this blog post, at least.

Imagine yourself in the following situation. You know your team, their strengths and their weaknesses. You know which members need to improve and in which areas. Like most, your team is made up of a variety of people: members who are eager to learn, who read everything they find, and others who don’t, for any number of reasons.

Even when you try to remind them to spend work time learning—remember, improving is part of the job—they don’t do it. They always have too much to do and can’t find the time.

But, what will we found if we pay attention just on the U.S. market? The U.S. is a market where 85% of all people use the internet and over 246 million are monthly email users (meaning they send at least one email per month).

More active users—this is the goal. However, we forget that before they can run, the users have to learn to crawl. The first step towards getting more active users is to figure out the users’ first interactions with the service.

Billions of Users… But a Lot to Improve

In spite of email’s status as one of the most popular online services and a mature product in terms of user interface and features, email providers have a lot to improve on in terms of user onboarding. So what are the key factors in a user onboarding process for an email service? What are the best practices if we want to improve the user experience?